google music

This is awesome. I got a beta invite about two weeks ago, and I’ve used it nearly every day since. Here’s why it’s awesome.

I spend about 90% of my weekly computer time on my work computer, far away from the hard drive I’ve worked so hard over the years to cram full of music. Sure I have my iPhone, the Hype Machine, Pandora, and (until they made the move that turned me against them — restricting their mobile app to paid subscribers only) Last.fm, and they’ve all done a great job of keeping my musical needs covered, but all have fallen short in some way. They never have exactly what I want when I want it. It’s always hard to find or bookmark specific songs. I was missing MY music library.

Then Google comes out with what I believe is their most selfless and philanthropic use of their gigantic servers. Over the last two weeks (yeah, it took that long which was lame, but c’mon, it’s a once-and-done process) I’ve been able to upload nearly 100GB of music. I’m sure it gets compressed heftily, but as far as streaming compressed music goes Google Music sounds pretty darn good. Imagine if every user uploaded a similarly large music library. That’s a lot of space Google is giving out for free. Sure sites of theirs like YouTube will surely always top Music’s disk-space needs, but it’s covered in intrusive ads. None of those on Music…yet at least.

Sites like Mashable have come out and said they’re not really excited about Music and think it leaves a lot to be desired…but what the fuck do you want from a FREE service? They cite things like the inability to purchase music from the site like you can on Amazon’s comparable service, and you surely will be able to from Apple’s forthcoming iCloud. But you know what you CAN do? Go to those other sites (that would charge you long before Google would to store the same amount of music), buy the songs you want, and upload them to Google. Now was that too difficult? And the lack of offline caching? How often are you not connected to the internet and really itching to hear that one song? Yeah, never. Mashable, get off your high horse.

Anyway, now I have my whole music library accessible from my work computer and my home computer without an external hard drive tethered to it. That is awesome right now.

github

This is mysteriously awesome. I can’t figure out why it’s useful to me, so that’s why it’s a bit of a mystery that I’m so infatuated with it right now. Maybe I like it so much because it’s the only “social network” that I’ve signed up for that requires you to enter terminal-style commands to set it up and create updates. That’s badass. [Side note: working with terminal commands is pseudo-awesome right now. I'm really excited when I type in a totally geeky command to a black and white window with mono type font and see shit happen.] Their entire site forces you to use https. It’s secure, and they flaunt it. Are you listening, Facebook?

If you care to follow me (and improve my code, I guess. Is that the point of the site? I really don’t know…what is it good for?!?), check my shiznit out at https://github.com/kohnmd. It is awesome.

being engaged

This is romantically awesome because my financé is awesome. I’m so excited to get married!

I was listening to headphones while doing the dishes tonight, and Ally was at her desk doing homework. This song came up on my iPod. I ran over to Ally, grabbed her hand and pulled her up from her chair. We had an impromptu dance party while this song played in my headphones. She didn’t hear a single note of music, but she still danced her heart out with me for the entire 3 minutes and 11 seconds.

That’s how you know you have an awesome girlfriend.

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I always seem to think that I’m not a fan of Dark Side of the Moon, but whenever I listen to it I realize it’s awesome. For some reason, though, I’ll forget that tomorrow and go back to thinking that I don’t really like the album.

Thanks to a new Google group I just joined, I get awesome new music in my inbox every day. I was running seriously low on good music. There’s only so many times I can listen to Portugal. The Man before it gets old, and even Kid Cudi radio on Last.fm is becoming repetitive.

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I didn’t mean to imply that I hadn’t listened to the Black Keys before I joined the super fun music group, but I was uninterested enough in their previous albums that their newest album’s release would have gone unnoticed to me. I actually really like it so far, though. Until it’s released on the 18th, you can listen to the whole thing on NPR.org.